


Ubi Amor, Ibi Ego Requiem

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Established Relationship, Love, M/M, Mild Blood, POV Second Person, POV Third Person, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:13:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26115490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: and yet- you are alive. simple and suffice. god does not want you and the devil will not have you and you are back to try again.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 12
Kudos: 43





	Ubi Amor, Ibi Ego Requiem

**Author's Note:**

> delighted to find out tenderness was already a tag

i.

you hear it in the base of your skull, the snap of a falcon's cry overhead. it turns into the hiss of the sun, the buzz of the heat, the sweat on the air and a humid breeze that plows through the overgrown grass. you are on your back in the middle of a field. you are on your back in the middle of a field and it is now and forever will be the field where you died. years ago, you tramped through here as a foal; years ago, no blood had stained the grassblades copper; years ago, you were alive and alive and alive. death did not yet know you by name. 

now it does, in painless clarity. and it will take you, now and again, from its brother, and shake you like a doll, and spit you back at life and ask, _do you want this? do you want this?_ you will be a chewed up thing, and life will take you back because you have nowhere else to go.

so you open your eyes: the sky burns, the air burns, _you_ burn. and yet- you are alive. simple and suffice. god does not want you and the devil will not have you and you are back to try again. you get to your feet, blood down your front, on your chin, in your hair. there's a streak underneath your left eye that looks like a tear, there's a clear path under your right that had been. you get to your feet and across from you, he gets to his, too. 

and the unwanted shall inherit the earth, so spoke eve, and her son abel.

…

Nicky had come awake on his side, already facing Joe, who is still pressed in sleep. Patches of light fall softly through the curtains--pale blue and lightweight, already hung by the time they arrived--and cast his features with a cinematic touch. He has a face for movies. Strong and kind, unhurried. It's in the line of his nose, the wrinkles by his eyes, the sinkhole-dimple in his cheek, where Nicky keeps some untouched part of himself. Raw and bloodied, and Joe had taken it without question, had wrapped it in fine cloth and tucked it away from harm.

He extends his index finger on his topmost hand and eases it past what is merely his side of the bed on paper. They sleep far too tangled for a border such as that, but for the sake of nightstands stuffed with paperbacks of varying taste and pillows that are either firm or not, there are sides and they are taken arbitrarily each night. He lands softly under Joe's eye, touches feather-light the thin skin there. It's blue-bruised, tired from the travel and the work before the travel and the meeting again of old friends that it isn't safe to stay with.

Tracing up, he curves under a bold black eyebrow and around to a steady temple, down to the soft skin where his jaw hinges, goes underneath to feel the scrape of stubble under his chin and then back up, looping once around his mouth, paying extra care to the bow of his lips. He's marking up the side of his nose, heading for the cavern between brow and eyelid when Joe comes awake, slowly, happily.

"Hey," he says with a smirk-and-smile, and then closes his eyes so as not to impede. Nicky finishes his portrait--title: sight of self, artist: Niccolò di Genova--and puts his hand to rest against the side of Joe's face, coaxing back open with a steady thumb fluid brown eyes that pinch at the corners.

"Good morning," he says, and exhales. They tuck their foreheads together and breath the morning to life, nose against nose, hand on beating heart. Nicky kisses him, for all the times he couldn't and all the times he can, and Joe kisses him back, like every year played in reverse, like every fleck of love has swept over his shoulders and down to his collarbones. They still kiss like that even though they've been at it for more years than there are dimes to a hundred dollar bill.

When they break apart, with a satisfying click, Joe smiles all the way to his eyelashes and Nicky grins with all his teeth and rolls back over so an arm will go around his middle and a hand will curve over his stomach and rub absently along his ribs. On the back of his neck where it meets his spine, Joe plants four more kisses before digging his nose into the crook of his shoulder. At the end of the bed, their legs and feet hook together, bunching the covers over quick calves.

Nicky wasn't much built for sloth, but there will always be a golden hour--the one thing that remains unchanged one century to the next--and he will always lay just like this until it's over. Or until there's bullets flying; in which case, he's learned the art of the rain check. If one were keeping count, this morning is a roll over from one that was spent doing much worse deeds in Andorra.

…

ii.

you don't smell the iron anymore, can't taste it when it's a thick haze in the air. they put a sword in your hand when you still had to clasp both tiny palms around it, and you are so used to the blood. your blood, his blood, mindless crowds. you can't feel it either, are familiar with its weight like a winter coat, so all that's left is to hear it when it drips from your fingertips. first onto dirt and then pebbles, cobblestone, concrete, pavement, hot, twisted metal. you know the sound of blood like you know the sound of his heart in his chest under your ear.

the years are long. sometimes, they're lonely, and sometimes, they crawl back to you and beg on monday knees with sunday hands. holy water on the knuckles, black soot on the palms; and the lie is always on the outside. sometimes, the years are too much to comprehend, and you do your best to forget.

there will be, have been, always are, moments that stick out to you. ones that raged your soul, and ones that flicked fire in your blood, and ones too that bind your heart to this day. in them all he's there, you at his side or he at yours.

every time you die, and there have been so many now you don't remember to count, you think you come back a new man. he is not absolved of your past sins, the son held to the deed of the father, but he tries to be a little better before adding to the list. new, with restarted marrow and cells and veins, new, and you think the only thing that does not change is the heart affixed to your name. because your bones never feel quite right and your sight always sees new things, but you do not stop loving (him) and you do not stop fighting for a world that cares a little more about the next and the next and the next.

you get used to the blood, your blood his blood mindless crowds, in the hope that you are keeping one child, just one, from ever having to put both unsullied palms around hilt or holster. does it matter, lord? you don't know, you don't care; you do it and do it well, for the wretched are divine in the eldest halls of man.

…

Nicky wakes up in the middle of the night grasping for breath. There isn't a face in his dreams anymore so much as there are hundreds, thousands, of snapshots. A face frozen in all-over horror, a horizon where the sun is blood-stained and the moon is weeping, a graveyard and a name that may be his mother's.

Joe, beside him, puts a sleepy hand on his back, notching his fingers to the timing of his spine. It only pokes out of his back when he's hunched over, practically begging the bones to break skin. He mumbles curses in Italian and rubs his dry eyes; Joe murmurs words in the same tongue that are all heart and blinks the sleep from his.

Up and down Joe's hand goes. Smooth fingers that bear not a single visible scar, not even a callous, and nails cut a little jagged over the trash bin in the bathroom that scrape Nicky's skin, reminding him of himself.

Joe calls him something gentle and coaxes him fully back to their little offshoot of time, hand up and down and up and down and then coming to rest on the back of his neck, running a circle with his thumb into a knot twisted under fair, hazy skin that pricks with sweat. Tonight he does this for Nicky and tomorrow he might, in turn, do the same for Joe. It's not a give and take or a push and pull, it's offering and acceptance and piety. To revere love and lover as spirit is to take life and stretch it beyond measure. 

With a kiss to the side of his head, Joe slips out of bed and steps into the adjoining bathroom. The drawer trawls out on old mechanisms and the faucet spurts cold water from the pipes with air bubbles in alarming frequency. Back he comes with a washcloth in hand, kneeling on the mattress at Nicky's hip. He takes his face in one hand and with the other silently makes him clean, pressing the cool cloth against his cheek when he's done and saying, "Rest, just rest."

Exhaling, Nicky tips his forehead against Joe's shoulder and braces himself with a hand on his thigh. He breathes plain soap and something drug store-y, either his toothpaste or his deodorant or maybe they come in matching scent. In his hair, he feels the faint stir of Joe's breath until they each doze again, propped up against one another in the middle of their bed, blankets disseminated around them in crater-form and hands earnest in their treatise.

…

iii.

he is love. he is love, he is love, he is love. you are borne of something good and something right with him, you are good and you are righteous with him. you never did understand virtue, not fully, you just learned the tune and sang along as best you could, but he makes you feel and see and think things, new things, great things. he makes you feel like you know something no one else before or after you ever has or will. because love--love is only with him, is it not? how can any other love be whole without him?

he is love when he teaches you the silly words he's learned from the day's new youth who take to him like ducklings to a row, and he is love when he looks up at a work of art with the edge of his thumb between his teeth, discerning, and he is love when you hold his hand as his body spits out the fragments of what you both have chosen. he is love when he folds around you and he is love when he touches you with all the care that has ever been and he is love, even when he snores right in your ear. he is love when he prays to his god and you hear him speak your name with a soft laugh.

bloodied and bruised and half-alive, he is love. there is a kind of loyalty in coming back to life with your face cradled in the palms of another.

…

Joe smiles all the way into the kiss, his hands on either side of Nicky's face. The inside of his hand is warm, the fine lines that work their way over fate and head and heart reshaping to fit alongside Nicky. And Nicky holds him, humbly, long fingers playing on a steady pulse. It's a kiss like a shot to the heart; which they've both dabbled in, are intimately familiar with the way the feeling arcs outward, down the muscles of the arms and into the hands, all in a split second just before. 

Nicky _aches_ with his love, feels it like a drumbeat within and without and all around. It's no war cry because war is hard and loving Joe isn't, but it's loud and lawless. Oh, Nicky aches with his love, but he has felt so much pain in his time that this is an embrace.

Sirens wail like widow's walks and if he closes his eyes, he hears the crash of the sea two hundred years behind him. He bled into it, just as he bleeds into the sewer grate now from the wounds down his legs. He wonders if he ever got himself back from the sea. 

Hands out, he puts one flush to Joe's forehead and smiles with chattering adrenaline at the little wrinkle in between his eyebrows and the absence of a wound. Joe dips into the touch like a young ram headbutting a fence post--with need and without reason. They are far away from the epicenter here, far away from so many times, and the worth of that is more than he can fathom.

Nicky starts trying to push to his feet first, but it's a lot of false starts that finally make Joe shake his head and put boots to pavement, leveraging him back to his feet with one hand and straining forearm. Instead of letting go once he's to his feet, Nicky curls their hands tighter and presses them between their chests as he draws him into a hug. His other hand goes to the back of Joe's head, Joe's to the split seam down the side of his shirt where skin has stitched and blood has dried. They close their eyes.

Nicky holds him, humbly, because it is a blessing every time and he is not so bold as to believe he will always have the chance.

…

nulla.

you sometimes think about the field where you died. it is your original sin, that first breath. it tasted sweet, of wildflowers and hurt. but you took a breath, and another, and you learned that day to take what you need to survive, but only just, and never more. you did not know of excess for many more years.

he told you once he remembers waking up in the field where he died too and closing his eyes again, just to see if it was some sort of falsehood corrected with a blink. hoping it was. when he opened them again there you were with a blade to his throat and he knew it would all be something. his hope changed. he told you once he saw you before he saw the sun and it unmade him. he told you once he knows you, and all that you are, and you did not tell him it pierced you deeper than the confession of love that would come in the hereafter from his perfect mouth. 

god does not want you and the devil will not have you but this man, he will take you on your best days and your worst days and will keep you in his strange and wonderful heart on the days you aren't there. this man is to you water to soil, light to life. He is not your sin, and you are not His.

**Author's Note:**

> i cried several times while writing this and i hope you too cried while reading it!
> 
> i'm on tumblr @professcrlupin !!


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